


Rarely I Weep (Sometimes I Must)

by picturecat



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Ghosts, HAROLD THEY'RE LESBIANS, Haunting, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, POV Outsider, because it's been like 200 years sorry, pining ghost-hunting lesbians from the distant future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:13:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27804364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/picturecat/pseuds/picturecat
Summary: Corah didn’t usually do anything about the fact that she could see ghosts.Mostly ghosts minded their own business; when she tried to talk to them, they usually ignored her. Or didn’t hear her at all. It was hard to tell.“Shouldn’t you be, like, using your abilities to help people?” Corah’s friend Yuna asked when Corah told her about them.Corah had shrugged, flicking through emails on the holo-panel by her bed. “They don’t seem to need or want my help, most of the time. Don’t seem to do much of anything, actually. It’s not like the books or movies. Hey, look at this compilation of cats attacking housebots.”That had mostly been that; Yuna seemed to take Corah’s word for it on the matter. Which was good, because if Yuna had pushed it Corah would definitely have caved. If Yuna asked Corah to walk on air she’d go right off the edge of the solar plateau.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	Rarely I Weep (Sometimes I Must)

Corah didn’t usually do anything about the fact that she could see ghosts.

Mostly ghosts minded their own business; when she tried to talk to them, they usually ignored her. Or didn’t hear her at all. It was hard to tell. 

“Shouldn’t you be, like, using your abilities to help people?” Corah’s friend Yuna asked when Corah told her about them.

Corah had shrugged, flicking through emails on the holo-panel by her bed. “They don’t seem to need or want my help, most of the time. Don’t seem to do much of anything, actually. It’s not like the books or movies. Hey, look at this compilation of cats attacking housebots.”

That had mostly been that; Yuna seemed to take Corah’s word for it on the matter. Which was good, because if Yuna had pushed it Corah would definitely have caved. If Yuna asked Corah to walk on air she’d go right off the edge of the solar plateau. 

So when Yuna asked Corah for help with an exhibit, of course Corah agreed without a single question, and met Yuna at the backdoor of the museum after hours. 

“What am I helping you with?” she asked, slipping inside as Yuna held the door open for her. 

Yuna made a hissing sound through her teeth and Corah glanced up through her phone, eyes narrowing. “I’d hate to be on the other end of that hiss,” she said. “What did you say this was about again?”

“I didn’t.” Yuna shifted. “I told you it was about an exhibit, but, you see… it’s about your powers too.”

Corah’s stared. “Yuna.”

“Yes?”

“Are you taking me to a haunted exhibit?”

“Yes. I think.”

“Yuna!”

“Corah…” Yuna’s eyes were huge, liquid and black. 

Corah groaned. “Yes, stop it, don’t give me that face. You know I’ll do what I can. What exhibit is it?”

Yuna brightened immediately, turning and heading towards an empty hall. “Great! It’s in the Avengers exhibit, Hall H.”

“No shit?”

Yuna grinned. “Yeah, it’s one of the artifacts. Every night the glass around it just... shatters. In exactly the same way. At exactly the same time.” Yuna frowned. “This isn’t even usually my area; I’m stationed in the permanent exhibits. But the temp exhibit workers have been so spooked; Jirulee begged me to take her shift. So I did. And I saw it. And…”

Corah waited for Yuna to finish her sentence, but she remained quiet, grimacing slightly. Corah shifted a little. “The managers must be going nuts,” she supplied. 

“They are.” Yuna’s lips were thin and grim. “They’ve been freaking out about dealing with insurance. To the point that I said I might be able to help, and they gave me permission—unofficially of course—to bring you in.”

They turned a corner. Corah found herself jogging slightly to keep up with Yuna’s stride. “You know I’ve never actually done this before, right?” she asked.  _ Save the once, and that was enough _ , she added mentally, grimacing. 

Yuna came to a stop in front of two tall double doors, swiping her hand over the identipanel. It flashed and chimed. YUNA WAN, AUTHORIZED, scrolled across in blue letters, and the doors slipped into the wall.

“I know,” Yuna said, and her voice had gotten very quiet. “But if there’s someone you can talk to, you can help. I know you can.”

Corah tried on her best reassuring smile. “I can sweet talk anyone on this side of the Andromeda no trouble, and you better believe it,” she whispered. And frowned. “Why are we whispering?”

Yuna turned her wrist up and tapped with two fingers. 0812 glowed white through her skin, and Yuna smiled tightly. “Because it’s already started.”

The hairs on Corah’s arm stood on end. She suppressed a shiver, examining the exhibit hall they’d stepped into. “I don’t see anything,” she whispered, although it wasn’t strictly true. She of course saw all the exhibit pieces. 

Although the displays were powered down, some of the things here were too iconic to go unrecognized. A reconstructed Quinjet was hanging from the ceiling, the boarding ramp hanging open. The far wall was taken up by costumes; even at this distance Corah could recognize an Iron Man armor and one of the original Captain America’s suits, and she could identify the others as belonging to Black Widow, Falcon, Hawkeye, and the Wasp.

“It’s not over there,” Yuna said. Her right leg was twitching like she desperately wanted to tap it, and she looked at the time on her wrist with a shaky exhale. 0813. “We have about six minutes, but I warn you, it’s going to start to feel weird in here.”

“Weird—?”

“You’ll know it when you feel it,” Yuna said briskly, and her voice at its normal tone seemed like a bellow. They both flinched a little, hunching away from the dark shadowed rafters above them.

“Come on,” Yuna said, voice low. “I’ll show you the exhibit.” She walked to the left side of the room, away from the shiny gadgets, the costumes, and the gear. A wall divided the main room from another, slightly smaller one, and Yuna strode forward without looking back.

As Corah followed, she struggled to ignore the hair-raising feeling on the back of her neck and, strangely, the lump in her throat.

The far end of the other room was a rounded-out wall of windows. The moon was beaming through so strongly that the dim after-hours lighting was hardly necessary—and the room felt so tense and fraught with emotion that Corah’s teeth chattered.

Yuna smiled weakly, standing too close. Corah could feel her warmth and the wool of her cardigan. “I hate this feeling,” she muttered. 

Grief. Rage. All of it bundled up in a sense of helplessness that had Corah on the edge of a breakdown. 

No wonder everyone had wanted out of here.

“Are you certain this is safe?” Corah asked. Yuna hissed air through her teeth again.

“No one’s been hurt so far,” Yuna said. She cleared her throat. “Three minutes now.”

She squinted at the room and then took Corah’s arm with her hand, guiding her over into the corner away from the windows. “The glass won’t hit us here when it breaks.” She pointed at a glass case over against the far wall. Inside it, something small was glinting gold in the moonlight pouring in from the windows near it. 

Corah blinked. “What is it?”

“A ring.”

Her eyebrows furrowed. “Right.” 

Turning slightly, she took in the exhibit pieces nearest them. At her elbow there were actual paper schematics of the iconic Widow’s Bite blasters used by the original Black Widow. Looking at them, she saw there was a silly doodle in the corner of a robot arm using them to blast what might once have been a blender. Okay.

She looked up. There was a colored drawing hanging on the wall, pressed in glass. It showed a redheaded woman lounging on a couch, her legs slung over the lap of a man who was recognizably Tony Stark, although not as the pictures in the history scripts showed him. Here he was grinning, eyes crinkled, all of his famed genius determination focused on applying dark purple polish to the woman’s fingernails. She was mid-smirk, mouth twisted as if she were about to make a devastatingly witty rejoinder.

‘TONY AND NATASHA’ was scrawled in the bottom right corner in black ink, 4/10/19 slightly under it. Then, just a little lower, the initials S.R.

S.R. That had to be Steve Rogers; everybody knew he’d been an artist. And that title meant the relaxed, near-laughter redhead was Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow, although the resemblance to the blank-eyed press photos in the history scripts was scarce. Something about it made Corah’s heart burn, like she was just now recognizing that once they’d been more than just stories.

Yuna’s hand clutched Corah’s arm and Corah jerked up. Scratch that—the burning feeling had clearly been something supernatural. Her head felt like it was buzzing, and now that she was undistracted, the fury churning the air was harsher than ever. But there was still nothing near the glass case.

Or was there?

Corah shook Yuna’s hand off, stepping forward hesitantly to squint at the air over the ring case. It seemed fuzzier, a little shadowed. Almost as though the moonlight wasn’t quite touching it.

“Corah,” Yuna’s whisper was barely voiced. “Corah come back. It’s going to shatter.”

Corah gasped. Quite suddenly, the shadow couldn’t be called that at all—it was a full-fledged apparition, one strong enough to cast a shadow of its own as it hulked over the ring case.

“GIVE IT BACK!” the shadow roared, its voice echoing with such force that Corah clapped her hands over her throbbing ears. 

Yuna lurched forward and grabbed Corah’s hand, yanking her back into the corner. As she did, the shadow raised its massive fists, bringing them down on the case with an inhuman fury.

It exploded so forcefully that Corah found herself hysterically thinking that Yuna saying the glass “shattered” was a massive understatement. The shards of glass from that small case shot across most of the room; Corah could hear pieces pinging off the walls and other displays and chiming against the ground.

The room fell silent, although it still seemed to echo with emotion. Corah looked up from the shoulder of Yuna’s cardigan. 

The shadow was smaller now, more the size of a regular human, and less opaque. And it couldn’t really be called a shadow anymore. There was color to it, texture, movement of hair and skin and cloth.

And muscle. Lots of muscle.

“Oh my god,” Corah breathed.

Beside her, Yuna opened her eyes and squeaked in shock. She was staring straight at the figure.

“You see him too?” Corah whispered. Yuna nodded. “Captain America?” Yuna nodded even more fiercely, her hair shaking out of place. “How?”

Yuna looked down and opened her mouth, but only another squeak came out. She squeezed Corah’s hand. 

Oh. Corah dropped Yuna’s hand. Yuna stiffened immediately, her eyes darting around the room, and then she snatched Corah’s hand again, grip claw-like.

_ Interesting. Note to self. _

Above the glass case, the figure—Captain America—was leaning over, his translucent hand hovering over the glint of gold. His hand closed around it, and through it, and came away empty, and that hopeless feeling pulsed so strongly that Corah almost choked on it. Next to her, Yuna’s eyes were streaming. 

The feeling started to fade. So did Captain America, now curled in on himself, and Corah threw her other hand up without thinking. “Wait!” she cried. 

He straightened abruptly, head snapping toward their corner. 

When he spoke, his voice was rough and soft like he’d been crying, nothing like the roar from earlier. “Hello?”

“H—” Cora gulped. “Hi. Hello. Captain.”

He turned back to the ring case and swiped his hand back through the ring again. His lips thinned. “I’m sorry. I’m busy,” he said, quite politely. “You’ll have to contact our press liaison if you want an official statement.” 

“No, I’m—I’m not a reporter,” Corah stuttered.

The Captain didn’t look up. He was tracing one finger above the surface of the ring, frowning. “I don’t have time for photographs.”

Yuna cleared her throat. “Captain,” she squeaked, and cleared her throat again. “Captain, do you know where you are?”

He did look up at that, but out the windows, gazing out over the lights of the city. “New York,” he answered simply. “What year is it?”

Yuna and Corah exchanged a look. “Two thousand, two hundred and fifteen,” Yuna whispered. 

The Captain’s breath hitched. “Then I’ve lost everything again,” he choked out. 

“Is that his ring?” Corah asked Yuna in a whisper. She nodded tightly.

“It’s my wedding band,” the Captain answered hollowly. “They took it from me. I was hurt, I was—and they took  _ that, _ they laughed and they took it from me while I was dying. I have to get it back,” he said desperately, turning toward them finally. His eyes were wet with tears. “I can’t go home without it. I told Tony I’d never take it off.” 

Corah bit her lip hard. “Captain Rogers. Do you know you’re dead?”

“Dead?” The Captain frowned, tilting his head. He looked down at his hands, and his body. “Yes, that’s right. I remember. Has someone told the others?” 

“Well, Captain, it’s like we said,” Corah replied. “It’s been... nearly a hundred sixty years since you died. The other Avengers were all told—everyone was—but it’s been a long time. They’re all gone too. You should be with them.”

The Captain made a dismissive noise, turning back toward the ring. “They took it from me,” he growled. “Do you know what that feels like? To be dying… And they could have taken the shield, they could have cut off my armor or a fucking ear for their trophy, and none of it would have hurt like this. They took my  _ wedding band _ .” His face was twisted with emotion. “I was supposed to die with that on my hand!”

“I’m sorry,” Yuna’s voice was soft. “You didn’t deserve that.”

Suddenly the Captain was right in front of them. They both flinched back, but the Captain was staring at the drawing from earlier.

“That was the moment I knew I wanted to marry him,” he said, subdued. “Nat got his ring size for me by insisting on returning the favor.” He nodded at the drawing, tracing the details of the Black Widow’s manicure. “He still had gold nail polish on when I proposed later that month.”

He turned to face them, his handsome face serious. “I need you to take my ring to my body.” His voice was calm, his jaw set. “I wanted to be buried with it. I need to be buried with it.”

“I—wait—” Corah stammered. 

“Nobody knows where you’re buried, Captain Rogers,” Yuna said. “The real location was kept secret. They buried an empty casket at Arlington.”

He shook his head once, sharply, dismissive. “Not there. Thor knows.”

“Yes, but we don’t exactly have him on speed dial,” Corah blurted. “He’s not even on this planet anymore! Please—we’re just regular people. We don’t know how to help you.”

The Captain smiled, a small thing, but real. “There’s no such thing as a regular person,” he said. “Everyone has a capacity to do good—sometimes only in small ways, but the small things count. Sometimes they count more than anything else.” He looked back and forth between them, reassuring. “Now, I’m sure there are lots of hotshots with heroes on speed dial, but none of those people are here, and none of them have your ability. You may be normal as blueberry pie, but you’re here and talking to me. That matters.”

Corah squeezed Yuna’s hand. “I just got a real Captain America speech,” she whispered. The Captain huffed and put his hands on his hips, shaking his head with a little self-deprecating laugh.

“Look, the museum has some contacts with the Maria Stark Foundation,” Yuna said. “We can at least ask.”

“Please,” the Captain asked. “You’re my only hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Corah and Yuna shared a baffled look. “What in the multiverse is a kenobi?” Corah asked.

The Captain scowled. “Kids these days, Jesus. I suppose you’re too good for Star Wars now that interplanetary travel is actually accessible.”

“We have no idea what you’re talking about,” Yuna said.

“Also, just because interplanetary travel is possible doesn’t mean we can afford it,” Corah pointed out. “Anyway, you do still want our help, right?”

He sighed. “I need your help. I can’t do it by myself.”

“Then we’ll try the Maria Stark Foundation,” Yuna assured him. “We’ll figure something out, I promise.”

“Thank you,” he smiled again, a little sadly this time. “Good luck.” He looked back at the drawing of his husband, and Corah realized he was fading again. 

He raised two fingers to his lips and then pressed them to the glass over the drawing. He was almost entirely translucent. They turned to leave.

“Hey,” the Captain’s voice said in Corah’s ear, and she turned back around. There was nothing there, but his voice echoed softly in the room. “If you see Tony… tell him I’m sorry.”

Corah and Yuna stood there a while longer, unmoving, hands still clasped as they stared into the room. Nothing further occurred.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm posting this as complete because I've had it long enough that I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna get back to it, and I think it stands on its own well enough. Let me know if you liked it! :)  
> Title from "Sophia" by Laura Marling


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